Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms Living Inside People's Brains
discovermagazine.com
discovermagazine.com
His advice was to cook all meats (be it pork, steak, etc.) well, and to avoid eating raw/uncooked meat. Apparently it reduces the chances of eating a living egg. No more medium-rare burgers for me since then.
"But sometimes tapeworms take a wrong turn. Instead of going into a pig, the eggs end up in a human. This can occur if someone shedding tapeworm eggs contaminates food that other people then eat."
Anyway, if you are interested, it is also possible to get other types of tapeworm from other kinds of uncooked meat (like raw beef or sushi), although only the pork tapeworm is known to cause cysticercosis in humans.
Sure, it's a tragedy.
Philosophical question - why should I pay my taxes to cure this condition 'worldwide'?
This isn't polio, this isn't the 18th century. We know how people get sick, we know how to prevent this problem. Everyone does.
This isn't something money can fix - this is a cultural problem.
We don't need to throw money at it, and certainly not at the Federal level. Because this isn't some kind of new thing, it's a people that have gotten lazy about public health and forgotten how awful epidemics can be.
It is - just like tape worm in the brain, a cultural problem, not something that money can fix.
I don't habitually go around blaming individual problems on 'society' or 'the masses'. But ...
It's 'us' that got weak. Our culture. We got lazy, decided that the poisons that eliminated bedbugs were bad, forgot how awful the things were, how much work it was to keep a household free of pestilence, and let them slip back in.
You can see this attitude everywhere from vaccine deniers to the fools who deride public health measures as intrusive on their liberties.
In epidemiology, an epidemic (επί (epi)- meaning "upon or above" and δήμος (demos)- meaning "people"), occurs when new cases of a certain disease, in a given human population, and during a given period, substantially exceed what is expected based on recent experience.
I think I'll steer clear of the pork chops today.
>"The eggs are shed in the infected person’s feces. Pigs swallow these eggs accidentally as they rummage for food on the ground. When the parasite eggs reach a pig’s stomach, larvae hatch and burrow their way into the animal’s bloodstream. Eventually they end up lodged in small blood vessels, typically in the animal’s muscles. There they form cysts and wait until their host is eaten by a human. (Pork has to be undercooked for the tapeworms to complete their journey.)"
They link Wikipedia which is no more explicit:
>"They are infected by eating undercooked pork that contains viable cysticerci."
I remember, when I was a kid, my grandparents had pigs on their farm and when they slaughtered one once a year, some dude with a microscope would come the next day, check it and put a stamp on it.
And I am pretty sure that it is the initial reason why some religions are not allowed to eat pork, a smart move 2k years ago, when there were no microscopes around.
In anthropology class, we were told that bone records showed the domestication of pigs, a subsequent explosion in pig population, then a sudden disappearance. The most likely explanation, we were told, was that pigs competed with humans for resources.
"But sometimes tapeworms take a wrong turn. Instead of going into a pig, the eggs end up in a human. This can occur if someone shedding tapeworm eggs contaminates food that other people then eat. When the egg hatches, the confused larva does not develop into an adult in the human’s intestines. Instead, it acts as it would inside a pig. It burrows into the person’s bloodstream and gets swept through the body. Often those parasites end up in the brain, where they form cysts."
The tapeworm larvae, on the other hand, is a big multicelular mofo and it can burrow itself into brain tissue just like it can burrow itself into muscle/pork.
This article was truly terrifying.
notes to cook pork a little beyond the recommended temperature in future